On 25 March, a small RoboHouse team went out in the fields of Oldeberkoop in East Friesland with gas leak detector Waylon and mechanic Rob. They began by checking the calibration to prevent malfunctions. Then they cleaned the detector mat and changed the filter, after which the search could start.

The two men proceeded slowly, constantly checking their tablet to see whether they were still close enough to the pipes. A big cart was pushed forward with the mat dragging behind it. Except for the grinding of the equipment on the sidewalk, everything was quiet.

The team waited to hear from the device, which is supposed to sound an alarm when it detects a leak. And then they heard it: a beep! After taking a few steps back, because the system lags, Rob sprayed a yellow dot. Waylon pointed to the beauty of the on-screen image that enables assessment of the severity of the leak. “It’s not a biggie”, Waylon said to the RoboHouse team. That means someone will come within a week to measure it again, before calling for a repair.

The team slowly walked on, looking for more leaks. When they bumped into any kind of obstacle, they had to lift the device over it themselves. They also pushed the big device while constantly looking down on their tablet. After a full day of leak detection, every member of the team could feel it in their shoulders.

The RoboHouse team then realised how easily bad ergonomics can lead to injuries. There have been tests with more expensive machines and Segways but a solution has not yet been found. So our ambition remains: develop robotic technology that transforms the daily grind of leak detection, but stay modest and don’t overestimate our progress.

At RoboHouse, the process of improving working life starts with the worker. “Research, development and co-creation go hand in hand to deploy robotics in the best way possible,” says Marieke Mulder, program manager. “The goal is to support 90% of the work in gas leak detection autonomously so Rob and Waylon can make the pipelines safe and future proof.”

The field research sparked many new ideas. Waylon was curious about next steps and Rob said: “I just hope we can come up with something that allows me to take the right routes without destroying my back by looking at the tablet all day”.

After the field session, the team from RoboHouse gathered experts from different sectors to analyse the challenges at hand and co-create the first concepts towards a solution. Development engineers Bas van Mil, Tom Dalhuisen and Guus Paris joined the team online in a workshop on Miro. Together they envisioned a way forward and this was translated into a roadmap to 2031 by the RoboHouse team.

There will be many interactions with workers at Alliander along the way, and many more hours in the field. Marieke Mulder says: “After walking just a mile through the mud, we have barely begun to know how it is to do this work every day. But by going beyond our lab, into the field, we already discovered so much more about the challenges that workers like Rob and Waylon face every day.”

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‘Shoot for the moon’ is taken quite literally by this team of students and professors from TU Delft. “We want to make the exploration of the moon available for a wider audience”, says Pieter van Santvliet, partnerships coordinator at Lunar Zebro. “So we build the world’s smallest and lightest rover.”

And what is the key to making a robust space vehicle as simple and cheap as possible? Korneel Somers, the team’s content creator, says: “The key is to not focus on one thing, but to create an entire system of collaborations”.

The Lunar Zebro discovering moon-like landscapes in Hawaii

A render of how the swarm would look on the moon

Testing the Lunar Zebro on a rugged terrain

Genius steals and this project is always looking for existing robotic innovations to combine and improve upon. Zebro’s distinctive C-shaped legs were sourced in this way. These plastic half-circles rotate over the highest point in the C, enabling the robot to take little steps on uneven terrain. The Lunar Zebro Legs Team coordinates these 6 identical parts with a special algorithm, resulting in a walking motion. Other teams are Team Thermal, Team Body, Team Power and so on.

A collection of Lunar Zebro’s on the lawn

Lunar Zebro’s oddly shaped leg allows it to move around rough terrains

The power of the concept manifests itself through the collective. Individually, the rovers have a simple design and are highly customisable. But collectively, they can in theory accomplish complex tasks. Zebros can work in a swarm, each robot making autonomous spur-of-the-moment decisions while the collective is achieving a common goal. And because they are cheap, losing one robot is not the end of the mission.

Sounds good. Current space missions are expensive and therefore highly focused. Affordable robots could open up moon exploration to a much wider range of research projects. Imagine we let rovers swarm the moon’s far side (the quietest radio location near Earth), to look for cosmic signals from intelligent life. Also, the extremely harsh conditions on the moon challenges Lunar Zebro students to become exceptional engineers.

But we are also curious what the Zebros may do on planet earth. Like all inventions, they will surely pop-up in unexpected places. To catch a glimpse of a possible future, we asked a professional decorator: “What would happen if you would use this?”

Selma making a big piece of decor

Selma having wall-paper with care for detail

Meet Selma van Gent. An inspiring professional who works as a decorator and interior designer. Which means she builds decors, is trained in decorative painting and is an expert in hanging wall paper. She first tells us she is “anti-computer and actually anti-anything-technological”. But then she sees the Zebros and starts exploring the possibilities of these little machines, and her ideas keep flowing.

Mapping the building site
“When I build something on-site, I have to take into account everything about the entire space”, she explains. “I have to measure distances and corners, estimate what sound does, how high things can be. Sometimes I get bogged down in details.” With a legion of Zebros at her command, Selma could just send them out to map the physical dimensions of the place, while she looks at the overall picture.

Intelligent robotic scaffolding

When she does paper hanging, Selma usually needs a structure to stand on. This scaffolding must be sturdy and safe, but also perfectly tailored so every wall is within reach. It often takes endless tinkering to get it just right. If Zebro rovers would be strong enough, and able to crawl on top of each other and interlock, a swarm of Zebros could be a wonderful self-constructing scaffold says Selma: “If they can analyse the required heights and combine these with my preferences, they could make the entire structure without me. That would be such a relief.”

Always bring me the right tools for the job

Our handy-woman can do all kinds of jobs, and she is blessed with all kinds of tools. Sometimes this blessing becomes a curse. When Selma is painting on Tuesday, and on Wednesday hanging wall-paper, and making props on Thursday, there are so many changes that she doesn’t always have all the right tools with her in the van. “I would tell the rovers what job I had today and they would know which tools I would need,” she says. “And they would stock the van for me and then always bring me the right tools for the job.” This would save a lot of headspace and allow Selma to focus on what she likes to do most.

These cheap robots are now made to explore the moon and withstand the harsh environment of space, but who knows what the future holds? Maybe they will eventually land on planet earth: in the creative spaces of professional decoration.

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A robot wheels in the kite and then slowly releases it, painting 8-shaped loops on the sky. As this happens, the motion of the unwinding rope generates electricity. This innovative solution harmonises power generation with the flows of the atmosphere. Kitepower uses wind to provide us with energy, but rather than simply sticking a big fan in the air and waiting for air flows to come and go, it latches on to the wind and stays with it.

Professor Schmehl explains his research: “We explored the idea of wind energy through the use of robotically engineered kites”. The result is a big sail floating high up in the air with a small unit that automatically steers, controls the pulling force and connects to the ground station. This ground station senses when to reel in the kite to convert a maximum of motion – or kinetic energy –  into electricity. Using only the vital parts of a wind-turbine, KitePower is cheaper to make, less noisy and more durable than traditional windmills.

KitePower is the company founded to bring this product to market. In England, the idea is to build kite stations in the sea, but in the Netherlands, KitePower is looking to launch them on solid land. The technical challenge now is to get fly the kite above a certain altitude and make its flight autonomous so the system can work without human interaction.  While this technology is being optimised, we were wondering: could there be a different, totally unexpected way of using this technology?

To explore this, we took Kitepower to Fransien Godeke, a kindergarten teacher in the Bilt. She has been educating four to six year-old children for 36 years. Her understanding of how kids grow and learn is incredible, and we were curious how Fransien would use this robot innovation in the context of her work.

Copied by a six-year old

“We once tried to build our own mini-parachutes in class, maybe we could make this as well?”, is her first thought. Fransien tells me that children learn most through playing and making things themselves. A re-engineering process would allow them to experience what is needed to keep a kite like this floating in the wind, without any help. She says: “We could use straws to make the shape, pull through little cords and find very thin paper to lift the entire toy in the air.”

Make a big dragon

Children also love pretending to be something they’re not. “Kitepower looks like it has a futuristic dragon skin”, Fransien fantasises. With a kite this large, the kids could transform into a ten meter long dragon. They could jump and run around and show of to other kids. Or build a big hut to shelter in and maybe also become a train. In short, she imagines that kids would make anything they want with this versatile piece of kite fabric created by Professor Schmehl and his colleagues.

Physics of flight

If the class would get access to a real Kitepower kite, we could try to get it up in the air together says Fransien: “Children somehow have the impulse to start running when they want to get something airborne. Perhaps this robot could show them how speed translates to lift and power”.

A theatrical flying dragon show for entertaining people in nature that also generates green dragon energy. How cool is that as a spectacle?

Finally, we come to the question whether childer would be clever enough to understand the concept of Kitepower. Fransien says: “If you show them the physics, they will understand it”. To illustrate how fast Fransien’s kids learn, she tells me her toddlers already code their own programs: “They get a little matrix, I tell them where the little robot – called Bbot – should go and they program it within minutes”.

KitePower is being developed to solve the world’s energy crisis, but in the kindergarten it becomes a wonderful tool for irreverent experimentation by the world’s youngest engineers. Just imagining what children would do with Kitepower, already opens up exciting new avenues that we didn’t see before. A theatrical flying dragon show for entertaining people in nature that also generates green dragon energy: how cool is that as a spectacle?

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In this series of articles, we take robot innovations from their test-lab and bring them to a randomly selected workplace in the outside world. It turns out that Fizzy could flourish in cafés and restaurants, where cheerful attentiveness is a much sought after quality.

‘Children learn through play’. With this truism as a starting point, researcher Boudewijn Boon was asked to enhance the benefits of play for children in care at the Máxima hospital in the south east of the Netherlands. During his research, he found that one thing is essential to playing: it has to be intuitive. This means that all structured approaches to stimulate play, must eventually lead to more unstructured and spontaneous behaviour. Such a beautiful paradox. Who would have thought that the golden idea would be in robotics?

“Children are invited to chase, explore and imagine with this robotic ball, turning a sterile and quiet hospital into a world of playing”

Boudewijn Boon, researcher at the TU Delft

Boon found three core principles for initiating healthy play. First, it must spread out spatially, so kids will explore. The second imperative is for children to use their entire body. And thirdly, there is the need to introduce randomness and spontaneity in the structured environment of a hospital.

Fizzy ticks each box almost perfectly. This autonomous robotic ball does not like to be captured, so children chase after him. Sometimes he begs for attention, which can sparks hide and seek games. All this creates freedom. A big contrast with the structured life that children know during their illness. Boon says: “Children are invited to chase, explore and imagine with this robotic ball; turning a sterile and quiet hospital into a world of play”.

What’s inside a Fizzy. By TU DELFT© Thierry Schut and Guus Schoonewille

The Fizzy team the faculty of industrial desig engineering at Delft University of Technology. By TU DELFT© Thierry Schut and Guus Schoonewille

Little wheels enable unconstrained and playful movement. By TU DELFT© Thierry Schut and Guus Schoonewille

This application of robotics moves us. But at RoboHouse, we also know that innovation often moves in mysterious ways. Once an invention is sold in stores, people may buy it for purposes that researchers could never predict. So we took the Fizzy and traveled to a workplace, to seek out someone with a practical focus and an open mind. A professional, but outside of robotics. We asked her: “What would happen if you would use this?”.

Lisan Peddemors

Sandwich making at brasserie Barbaar in Delft

Lisan Peddemors considers our question. She has been working as a chef for several years in a cosy little brasserie in Delft, called Barbaar. We know her from making sugar sweet blondies and beautiful beetroot-hummus-sandwiches. But today, she helps us to anticipate the future.

Idea #1: Cheery and cheap kitchen cleaning

She would not trust a little robot to do any real cooking, she says: “Cooking is so subjective, it depends on thousands of variables whether you add some more salt”. Her first thoughts go out to all the things she would prefer to no longer do. Such as cleaning. The robot could be an excellent solution for that, with some minor adaptions. If you let it roll through soap and water first, Fizzy could clean the parts of the kitchen that Lisan can not get to. Or maybe when it is busy and there is a lot of trash, our little friend can take it out.

“Perhaps I could use it as a cheap kitchen assistant that’s never grumpy,” she says. “But then I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.”

If the ball would truly have its own mind, it could also be a nuisance in the kitchen. Lisan explains that timing is everything. When it is busy, cooks dance around each other like a real tango. Could a robot ever fit in? But then it strikes her! The ball does not have to do everything right, it only has to sense when something is wrong.

Idea #2: The subtle alarm

Lisan says: “Suppose, when I’m getting something out of the cooler or have a coffee at the bar, Fizzy would give me a little notification that something is burning or a timer is done. Gently, without alarming any customers or colleagues. This cute little ball would bump against my leg and I would know I had to rush back to the kitchen!”.

Fizzy, the discreet warning system with a cute character. That’s how a restaurant chef looks at the robotic ball that Boudewijn Boon and his collaborators are developing. Where Boon sees a robot that adds spontaneity to the sterility of the hospital, Lisan sees a solution for distraction. Quite a difference, but that’s what happens when robotics enters the workplace – we are bound to be surprised, and sometimes maybe even delighted.

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